RUN to the Hills - the title of Iron Maiden's iconic rock anthem - could describe Martin Currie chief executive Willie Watt's passion when he is able to tear himself away from the Edinburgh headquarters of the investment management company.

Watt likes nothing more than getting away from it all. "Apart from reaching for the beer glass, I like to find some wilderness areas to visit, - which could be the Scottish Highlands or further afield - with my sons," he enthuses.

But free time is not something too forthcoming for the Aberdonian who took over the running of Martin Currie in January 2001 at a time when the firm was perceived as a small, woolly generalist.

Since then, the fund manager - which now employs some 250 staff predominantly in Edinburgh - has flourished. Funds under management have almost tripled, from £5.5bn in September 2001 to £14.9bn in September 2007.

Revenues also rose sharply from £35.6m in September 2001 to a record £80.4m by December 2006, while operating profits leapt from £2.3m in September 2001 to £21m in December 2006.

Watt's remit when he took over was to lead a programme of change to transform a well-respected Scottish investment house into a dynamic international business.

To deliver his "big boutique" vision, he assembled a team capable of refocusing the business on specialist equity activities, creating a robust operational programme and reinvigorating the company's culture.

His immediate goals when he took the helm were to understand the people and develop a plan for the following few years. "I didn't have a plan when I joined - I just knew that we would need one!" he admits.

During those first few months - which coincided with the last bear market - Watt and his team were continually restructuring the business as each aim was realised.

"The company has ended up with a product range that I think is internationally competitive. We have a global client base in almost every continent, we have a distinctive, fitfor-purpose culture that unifies the business and we have met the financial metrics that you would expect from a high growth, successful business," he points out with pride.

Despite Watt's success since leaving university with a degree in geography, he had experienced working life at just one company before joining Martin Currie.

He joined private equity investment house 3i in 1984 before being appointed as a member of the board in 1992. Watt's meteoric rise continued when he became managing director, Scotland, and a member of the UK management group in 1995.

Recalling his days at 3i, Watt believes his greatest achievement was to take a generalist approach that permeated through the firm and to develop a more focused view on specialist areas - an uncannily similar approach to the one he has adopted at Martin Currie.

"I was able to persuade the guys in Aberdeen that they should focus only on oil and gas and was able to get the people in central Scotland to focus on main market buyouts and technology," he explains.

But after 16 years, Watt decided he had had enough and started to look for another challenge.

"It was quite a big step to leave," he admits.

"I thought I had gone as far as I could within 3i. There wasn't an opportunity at the time to do a bigger job and I felt that, after 16 years, I needed to either progress or leave."

His decision to resign took many industry experts by surprise at the time but Watt is adamant he made the correct decision, even though he had nothing lined up. He needed different challenges but couldn't spare the time to work out what he wanted to do while still running 3i.

The intervening months between Watt resigning from 3i and accepting the challenge offered by Martin Currie focused his mind on what he wanted to do.

"In the five or six months after leaving 3i, it became clear to me that what I was interested in doing was running a business," he explains. "I got more and more involved in management at 3i and I knew what I wanted to do was run a business in the way that I thought it should be run."

So what attracted him to Martin Currie which, at the time, had come to the conclusion it needed an external chief executive? Watt says he developed some ideas, both at 3i and working with other entrepreneurs, seeing what they did right and wrong.

"Part of the attraction of Martin Currie was a growing enthusiasm for what could be achieved," he says. "I felt there was huge potential that had not been realised.

"When I came here, I could see we had a lot of really good people and that the reputation of Martin Currie in the marketplace was very good - it was trusted and it was believed to be straightforward and honest and open and cared about its clients."

Part of the attraction was the fact that Martin Currie is owned by its employees. Watt felt it presented an intriguing challenge as an employee-owned company ought to be more efficient than a company that is not owned by its workers.

"That is very different from an elitist ownership structure where only the very senior people are shareholders or a structure where employees own a very small percentage of the shares," he explains.

"What it means is that, although I am chief executive of the company, I am also accountable to the employees of the company."

Watt feels the biggest challenge of this type of ownership is the need to communicate all the time.

His door is always open and he hosts meetings on a regular basis to talk to the whole company about the business, which are followed by Q&A sessions to sort out problems employees may have.

"I don't want that approachability to get in the way of the management of the business, but equally it is important to keep that culture of being a small company alive."

Towards the end of last year, the company decided to take on outside investment that many observers saw as a prelude to the company being sold off. But Watt insists this was far from the truth.

Martin Currie agreed to sell 17.43 per cent of its equity to Crestview and 7.47 per cent to interests associated with Lord Rothschild. The remaining 75 per cent of the company continues to be held by Martin Currie's employees.

Despite having a seat on the board, the new investors have no say in the day-to-day running of the business. "One of the reasons that we chose them is that they are noninterfering shareholders," grins Watt.

He explains there were two reasons for this decision. The first was that there were people who had gone through the transformation of the company and had built up considerable personal wealth. "We wanted those people to be able to take some of that wealth off the table," says Watt.

The second reason was that there were younger directors who owned share options and - because of the success of the company over the last few years - it was becoming more expensive to go from being an option-holder to a shareholder.

A restructuring of the balance sheet associated with bringing in new investors was seen as a way to allow these workers to become shareholders.

Over the seven years since he has been at the helm, Watt admits it has not all been plain sailing. The bear market from 2000 to 2003 made it harder for him to do what he wanted in some ways because revenues were under pressure and there was a lot of uncertainty in the world. But it was easier in others because both staff and clients were more open to new ideas.

Watt says: "We had quite a culture change programme to go through at Martin Currie and that was something that took us some years to get right.

"It takes time to build the product suite to the quality that you would like. If you are going to try to build a good business it does take time to achieve it."

Martin Currie's global credentials are evident in the breakdown of its client base. While the UK represents 31 per cent of all clients, North America, continental Europe and the region of Africa and the Middle East have been developed, taking shares of 27 per cent, 17 per cent and 12 per cent respectively.

This was a deliberate ploy, according to Watt. "It would have been much cheaper to have a UKonly business and we would have had lower overheads, but we wouldn't have had the same growth potential," he explains.

"When I joined the firm we had a vibrant US client base - which we still have - but what we have done is develop the client base in mainland Europe, in the Middle East and in the Far East - where the clients make up 3 per cent of the total."

While continuing to develop the rest of the world, Watt is determined not to take his eye of the UK market where he insists there is still much work to be done.

"We feel there is a lot we can do in the UK in terms of developing our client base," he argues.

One of the things that has characterised the Watt years at Martin Currie has been a shift from the firm being dependent on the pension fund market to being much more balanced between the pension fund market and the wealth management market.

"We have some of the most prestigious wealth management firms and pension funds in the UK but we still want to develop our UK client base."

As the saying goes, it is deja vu for Watt as markets around the world crash in response to the US sub-prime mortgage problems and the subsequent credit crunch.

He is concerned there is no confidence in the markets, with cash building up in the hands of both individuals and institutional clients.

But, while he thinks the next few months will be difficult, he has confidence in his team to pull through.

"We have been here before," he explains. "The management team that runs the company was running it during the last period of negative market volatility and I am confident we will make the right decisions this time around."

He is also convinced Martin Currie's decision to concentrate on equities will show its true worth in these difficult times.

"Equities are the right asset class to be in for the long run and I am very pleased that our firm focuses on them," he enthuses.

"For the long run, they will provide the best risk-adjusted returns.

"A lot of the problems in the financial system relate to instruments to which we have no exposure.

We are not in property funds or high-yielding bond funds where there are major default problems.

"We have a very pure model in terms of what we invest in and I feel that will hold us in good stead in difficult markets."

As to the future, Watt insists the company will continue to grow while maintaining its boutique culture, the slogan for which - dreamt up by Watt - is "we don't intend becoming the biggest, but we do intend to be the best".

"We have to make sure we have the right product suite for what our clients require and - while we only focus on equities - we've got to make sure we can manufacture what our clients require to a high standard," says Watt.

"For us, that's highly active-equities that focus on generating superior returns through managers' skills rather than through quantitative or passive mechanisms."

This attitude has brought rewards. During 2007 alone Martin Currie was named equity manager of the year in the Global Money Management Pension Funds Awards for Excellence; winner in the Asia Pacific category of the Money Observer Investment Fund Awards - repeating its 2006 success; winner of Standard & Poor's Fund Awards in the European Equity sector in both the UK and European awards for its European Opportunities fund.

Watt's other great passion is rugby, which he watches from schoolboy to international level. In an attempt to give something back to the sport, Martin Currie sponsors the Scottish Rugby Union's youth development programme as well as development of the women's game.

"Our help will make it easier for boys from a wider background to succeed in rugby and to showcase the women's game," says Watt.

THE SUMERIAN FOUNDATION

Despite being up to his eyes in the day-to-day running of Martin Currie, Willie Watt still finds time to try to help others less fortunate than himself.

The Sumerian Foundation - which aims to help disadvantaged young people in the developing world, particularly in Kenya - was set up by Scottish technology entrepreneur David Sibbald.

Watt became friends with Sibbald when Watt was at 3i and Sibbald was chief executive of Atlantech, a 3i client. Sibbald sold Atlantech just as the dotcom bubble was about to burst in early 2000.

Watt says: "David is probably the most successful technology entrepreneur Scotland's ever produced. He sold his business to Cisco, set up the Sumerian Foundation and asked me to help him develop it."

Watt joined the board of the foundation with a number of other high-profile Scottish business figures, including Calum Paterson of Scottish Equity Partners, David Allen of Biggart Baillie and Tom Cromar of architect Cooper Cromar.

"What I do is to help David develop his ideas on self-sustaining growth, getting away from the idea that aid is all about famine relief and short-term fixes and getting into the idea that what we are trying to do is use business techniques and business skills to allow people to help themselves," explains Watt.

"That's a much more sustainable model."

Watt admits that working on the charity takes up a little of his time every day. "I would like to be more involved and I've been to Kenya to see the programmes that we are helping with," he adds. "I've got no doubt that we can develop that and expand it."